See Susan Quilt

My mother got her 80th birthday quilt last week, and it was only about a month late! The top was actually pieced by her birthday, but the back still needed to be completed and the pieces and parts needed to be made into the finished product.  With some excellent quilting by Jennet at icepurplepenguin , the quilt is beautifully done and now at home with its new owner.   Here is a picture Jennet shared with me of my quilt sandwich getting quilted in a lovely purple thread followed by a front view of the finished quilt as it made a brief overnight stop at my house. Time to start a new project! What fun! Susan

Finished the back of my mother's belated birthday quilt and it is ready to be quilted and bound. The binding is going to be made with a very precious yard or more of Kaffe's freckles fabric in blue. I really enjoyed piecing the hearts and gizzards pattern to make the back panel.  Most of the fabrics I used in the quilt got used up, so there aren't many leftovers except the bits and pieces now in my Kaffe scrap jar. Here is a picture of the finished quilt back: I really had fun mixing in the flower print with the fabrics I used on the front of the quilt. And just for fun here is a photo of the Kaffe freckles fabric for the binding so I can remember I once had such a large piece of this extremely hard-to-find and absolutely yummy fabric... Happy quilting! Susan

I am making progress on my "Hearts and Gizzards" quilt for my mother's 80th birthday.  The top is complete and it is time to make the back.  I have had to hunt for and order several fat quarters of numerous "hard to find" Kaffe fabrics that are in this quilt top so I can make more blocks for the back of the quilt.  Here's a look at the completed top.   Although they are not sewn together in this photo, all of the pieces are together now. I laid the blocks down in random order.  The only rules were not to have the same fabrics touching one another and to try and make the center wheels contain 8 different fabrics.  I must say, this simple layout strategy worked out pretty well. Happy quilting! Susan

I just had to know how many pieces were in my finished broken dishes quilt top, so I did a little math. Each square with 16 smaller hourglass squares has 64 pieces.  Each of the larger squares has 16 pieces. There are 143 total squares in this quilt top, 63 of them the smaller blocks and 80 of the larger blocks.  That equals 4032 pieces in the smaller center blocks and 1280 pieces in the outer, larger blocks for a grand total of 5312 blocks, yow. Here are two pictures of the finished quilt! Now on to piecing my mother's birthday quilt... Susan

I need to put together four more blocks for an outside strip on this quilt and then the top is finished. The outer border strip on the right side nearest my ironing board is the missing outer strip.  Somehow I counted wrong and came up just a bit short on blocks, which is easily remedied. Here's how it looks in its "almost complete" state... There sure are a lot of pieces in this quilt top. I may just have to count them myself to see just what the final number is. How many pieces do you think there might be? Susan

My mother requested a quilt for her 80th birthday later this year, so it's past time to get started.  I decided to do a wild quilt with bright Kaffe Fassett Collective fabrics.  I am happy with my decision based on this first block I recently finished as a "test drive".  Here it is: Take a look at a full size view, too, with the block all trimmed and ready to go.  The Kaffe Plink in black and green, the very hard-to-find Gazania, his long out-of-print Organic Dots in gold and the Puff were the core fabrics I decided to use when selecting other more readily available prints and colors for this newest project.  It is quite a contrast to the Broken Dishes quilt top, which isn't nearly so bold and vibrant.  The pattern is actually a Kaffe pattern from one of his books (I forget which one!) called "Hearts and Gizzards". The quilt in the book is done in blue and white fabrics and is much tamer in appearance than this quilt will be. T his project...

Isn't it amazing that just when you think you have finished your quilt top, you discover you have more blocks to make and a bit more work to do!  That's certainly been the case for me today as I started constructing my quilt top only to discover it isn't quite as large as I would like.  Here's the first look at all the bits and pieces: Aren't the colors fabulous?  I think I am going to deviate a bit from the original design and put an edge around the inner, small hourglass blocks and then make an extra row or two of the larger blocks for the outer edges.  Hope I have enough fabric to make this happen!  Some of these fabrics are very rare and difficult to acquire, like the Kaffe Confetti Batiks.  Stay tuned for round 2... Susan